$100 K. I thought that would get everyone’s attention. And it’s the first thing I say when I meet with young singer/songwriters and their parents as we start the educational process of moving up from the basic performance skills of singing their own songs and playing guitar or piano to the rarefied air of the art of entertaining. That’s what I do these days as a live music performance coach.

Usually, the teenager has spent a few years mastering those skills and his or her parents are dutifully impressed enough to begin to support (and finance) the next steps in their aspiring offspring’s musical career. But I almost always find that once the passable performance plateau is reached, the student assumes (and somehow has convinced the parents) that the next goals are to record and release and album, make a video or two, and then go on tour.

That’s where I step in and save them the $100K (for now) and the time spent doing all of those things too soon. First, we need to discover IF the son or daughter is ready for those things or not. My experience is not.

Let’s start by doing the math behind the $100K figure.

ALBUM: To do things right as far as creating a well-produced album of 12 songs (assuming the songs are ready to be recorded at all): $25K. Yes, you can do it cheaper, but if you’re not going to do it well, why do it at all? Then there is the matter of the sales, marketing, promotion, advertising, publicity, etc. (which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars). But for the sake of argument, we’ll go low budget here: $25K.

So there’s $50K right there. The track record for professional marketing, promotion, sales and publicity people working a new artist with no fan base and only $25K is spotty at best. So since you have no fan base, the album goes nowhere. Money down a rat hole.

VIDEO: Pretty much the same deal. You can do it cheaply, but why? Do it professionally and correctly or else it’s a total waste of time and money. One relatively inexpensive professional video: $25K. I know because I recently was asked to keep track of budding artist’s video costs for her parents. Since there was no fan base, nothing happened.

TOURING: Given that the young artist has no fan base in his or her hometown, let alone regionally or nationally, the only hope is a buyout as third/fourth/fifth on a bill with some friends headlining. The cost of that buyout, once you include travel and lodging at any level, food, gear, band, crew, whatever – let’s call it another $25K. Don’t think so? Have you budgeted any tours recently at the level we’re talking about here? I have. That’s a fair number to do a four-week tour as a buyout with no income. And at then end of the day, you’re an unfamiliar artist performing your unfamiliar songs to an unfamiliar audience. How do you think that’s going to work out?

So there’s your $100K. Now it must be pretty obvious that there’s no sense in spending all that money when you’re just starting out. What’s the potential ROI? Easy answer: None. Here’s why.

YOU’RE NOT READY. The precursor to making an album and a video and going out on tour isn’t the fact that you have written your own songs and that you have some modicum of experience of singing and playing from a open-mic night stage for your family and friends. The mandatory thing you need to accomplish first is to learn how to not just perform for an audience, but to ENTERTAIN an audience. Just standing center stage behind a stationary mic stand and singing your mid-tempo songs, one at a time, is NOT ENTERTAINING.

If, instead, the artist were to spend the time (and a lot less money) to learn the craft and art of entertaining an audience from a stage on a regular basis, many things would/could/should happen. First of all, gradually the singer/songwriter would learn which songs work and which ones don’t just from audience response. That would make it way easier to decide which songs to record.

Then the subsequent lessons taught and learned about how to enter a stage, how to move around, and how to use visuals and your physical presence to convey emotion in the delivery of your songs will all go a long way toward deciding how to look, act and behave when it comes time to invest in the making of a video of the song that gets the best response.

But mostly, the knowledge and experience of being able to genuinely entertain an audience of complete strangers will prepare you for the proper time when you leave your comfortable hometown crowd and be called upon to do so on a nightly basis for people who couldn’t care less about you or your hometown crowd.

In fact, if you’re successful in the pursuit of knowing how to entertain an audience and draw ever-increasing numbers of ticket buyers to your shows, perhaps the parents won’t have to shell out the $100K after all. There are plenty of record companies, managers, agents, attorneys, promoters, publicists, and all other forms of artist support out there looking for promising successful singer/songwriters. But they aren’t just looking for talent – there’s talent everywhere. They’re looking for ENTERTAINMENT and for artists who have worked hard to attain those goals. Those are the attributes you need to have to attract the attention of the industry.

Oh, did I mention that none of this can be accomplished in a weekend or a month and maybe not even a year? It takes consistent, concentrated effort to achieve all of this. And just as you probably had instruction in learning how to play guitar and piano and to sing properly and write songs, you’re going to need instruction from a live performance coach in order to get up to the next level – that of an ENTERTAINER! Be sure to find a coach who’s going to save you $100K right off the bat. Go to my website – www.diditmusic.com – to learn more.

There’s always been a notion that if we could emulate the lives of those we admire, then our lives would have the same outcomes as theirs – talented, successful, rich, famous, happy, whatever. That, of course, explains all the “Seven Secrets of…..” books and the popularity of biographies as treasure maps to our desired fortunes. Although the lives of successful music artists fall into that same category and there are certainly crafts and skills to be mastered, there are two areas that cannot be duplicated, which are, unfortunately, the two most important things required for success – artistry and luck. Which is why nothing compares to Prince. His was the perfect storm of skills, artistry and luck.

His talents were unparalleled in the world of popular music and so heralded so much recently that there’s really no reason for me to list them here again. Know that each of the skills he mastered required the now-proverbial 10,000 hours of learning, practice, and self-discipline – each of them. All the talent in the world still requires that amount of woodshedding, trial and error and back to the drawing board perseverance. Who among us has that drive? Who’s out there now picking up the torch?

Even putting in that kind of life-long work doesn’t necessarily produce a successful career in the arts. You have to have the inborn talent to take those well-honed crafts and elevate them into art. Prince had that talent. I don’t and probably neither do you.

And even putting that innate talent aside, there’s the inevitable requirement to be in the right place at the right time with the right thing. Here’s where luck favored Prince. His heritage was black music from Louisiana but he grew up in white bread Minneapolis. That meant he had parental music influence from an early age but wasn’t hampered by local customs of what music he should or shouldn’t be doing. That way, much as the Beatles in Liverpool, he opened out of town so that when his time came, he was ready.

His artistry was influenced by the immediately previous two decades of black music crossover and he blatantly stole from the best of them (a la the Beatles again) – Little Richard, Elvis, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, Sly Stone and, of course, Jimi Hendrix. The time was ripe for someone to combine all of those performance elements with the music of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. And that’s where he set himself apart from all of those who preceded him and apparently all of those who followed – live performance.

And speaking of luck and live performance, I was fortunate enough to have been a part of the Warner Bros. Records Artist Relations staff in the early ‘80s, which provided me with the assignment to go out on tour with Prince, mainly to work with whatever other talent he had found, developed and brought out on tour with him, i.e., The Time, Vanity Six, Apollonia 6, Sheila E. That afforded me the opportunity to witness any number of Prince shows and see first hand on a nightly basis how he had amalgamated all of the now-standard performance tropes into one concert – essentially a history lesson in showmanship, drawing on what had preceded him in the previous two or three decades.

His shows were non-stop music – no between-song tunings or swigs of water from plastic bottles – non-stop music. Just as an example, you can Google the late 1982/early 1983 Controversy tour and find video of the opening numbers. During the course of the first song, “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?”, he went from an a cappella gospel intro, into a funky pop/rock band groove, to an Allman Brothers twin guitar break with Dez Dickerson, to a James Brown thing with the mic stand, to a Hendrix-inspired solo guitar break, to a hair band pose with Dez and bassist Mark Brown, to a stage right stunt playing guitar with his left hand on the fretboard and his right hand banging out a riff on a synthesizer, back to center stage for a heavy metal band bombastic ending, which included a directed vamp to the final chord, à la James Brown on the TAMI show. All in the 12-minute version of the first song!And it went on from there – stopping along the way to visit every possible 20th century musical style – all done seamlessly and with professional panache.

And that’s why nothing compares to Prince. It’s hard enough to imagine that such an artist actually existed and in our lifetime, let alone thinking someone might be able to duplicate his artistry. Although the luck of being in the right place at the right time with the right thing certainly played a part, this guy had it all. He taught himself how to do it all. He had the drive and the talent to do it all. When his big break came, he was ready. Like no one before him and, from what I can tell, no one since.

Epilogue: Everybody I know has a Prince story – most are either strange or befuddling, but here’s one with an amusing ending. My wife and I attended the “1999” tour show at the Universal Amphitheater in LA later in 1983. We had some great seats in the Warners allotment, about 15-20 rows back, center section, left aisle. Actually we were seats 3 and 4, no one was in seats 1 and 2. Then about two or three songs into the show, two big guys came stumbling down the aisle stairs in the dark looking for what ultimately would be our row. The first guy in apparently couldn’t see a thing and the other guy had to help him into his seat – it was Stevie Wonder. His security guy asked him if he wanted anything, Stevie said no, and the other guy left, leaving Stevie sitting next to my wife.

We naturally thought that this was pretty cool as did everyone around us and we went back to enjoying the show. Prince kicked into I think “Let’s Go Crazy” or some big rave up song and Stevie turned to my wife and shouted, “What’s he doing?” My wife shouted back, “What’s who doing?” and Stevie replied, “Prince! What’s he doing?” So my wife proceeded to describe to Stevie, to the best of her ability, what was happening on stage. He thanked her and said, “I love your accent!” Next song, same thing. Every song after, same thing. By the end of the show, she was practically in tears from the ludicrousness of the whole situation.

When Prince left the stage for the false exit, Stevie’s guy reappeared. “C’mon, Stevie,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before everyone else.” And Stevie shouted back for everyone to hear, “I’m not going anywhere until I hear ‘Little Red Corvette!'” Sure enough, Prince came back on and played “LRC”. Stevie got up for the first time and danced like a wild man, singing along with every word until the final chord of the song. Then he said to his handler, “OK, we can go now.” He thanked my wife for her help and disappeared up the aisle into the passageway out.

Footnote: I happened to be at the House of Blues Foundation’s Music Forward show at the Wiltern in LA the night everyone heard about Prince’s passing. Local KABC Ch. 7 news was there and asked me for a few words in reflection. Here’s the link to an otherwise really nice piece:

Here’s to all of these things coming true in 2017 so that there might be a happy and fruitful 2018!

1. Return of Real Songs

Millennials will come out of their collective fog and realize that what passes for pop music these days – well-produced, pleasant, beat-driven, formula, lyrically repetitive, singsongy, non-melodic music – are not really songs. Real songs – narrative stories with beginnings, middles and ends (as well as the clever bridges) – will stage a comeback, and real songwriters and performers will breathe a collective sigh of relief.

2. Mic Technique Revolution

A superstar singer will set an example on proper microphone technique for the rest of the pop and rock entertainment world by taking the mic out of and away from his or her mouth, allowing us to not only finally see the singers’ facial expressions but to also prevent them from popping their p’s. This epiphany will not spill over into the rap world.

3. Live Performance is Everything

Concert promoters, club bookers and agents will refuse to sign or book any act that isn’t any good at entertaining an audience in a live performance situation. The result? Only artists who have developed an entertaining live show will be allowed to perform. That will bring ticket-buying audiences back into venues and no more pay for play. It will also require artists to learn how to entertain instead of just singing and playing at the same time.

4. Who’s your agent?

As live performance revenue becomes the gold standard for music artists, booking agencies will become the most influential aspect of artists’ careers, surpassing record companies and managers in that respect. Again, an artist’s live show will be the centerpiece of their careers.

5. Local Radio Plays Local Music

Terrestrial local radio stations will regain control over the music they play from their national conglomerate home offices. Music fans will have some sway in what gets played on local radio though real-time mobile apps linked directly to the local radio station studios. The rising tide of listenership will raise all advertising rates boats. Win/win.

6. Performance Royalties from Radio

Congress will expand current performance payments made by radio stations to writers and composers to include master rights holders and, hence, the performers (as it is in the rest of the world except mainly North Korea, Iran and China – great company we keep, huh?). When this long-overdue slight is righted, American master rights holders and performers can then additionally start collecting those performance royalties that are currently being collected (but not paid out) to US-based artists from75 other nations around the world. All in all, it will mean millions of dollars in windfall to the American music creative community from both here and abroad.

7. Better Streaming Rates

The Constitutional right to a regulated and fair compensation for writers, composers and performers will be enforced on digital streaming companies and extended to all future but currently unknown methods of an audience enjoying an artist’s creative endeavors.

8. Music As Merch

CDs and downloads will be officially relegated to the merch table, websites and indie stores, as artists and record companies finally concede that streaming is the preferable (and more profitable) way of buying music for instant and daily consumption.

9. Record Companies Evolve

Record companies (still the best source of funding, marketing and promotion of an artist’s music career ambitions) will rightfully continue with their 360 deals, but will divert attention away from music salesand focus more on the revenue that can be generated (and commissioned) from live performances, publishing and merchandising (which now includes CDs and downloads). The strength of an artist’s live show will weigh in larger than before in evaluating label signings.

10. New Artists Breakthough on Indie Labels

Indie labels will continue to be the grass roots discovery and nurturing ground for new and developing artists. Many will offer all the services of a major by utilizing third-party independent marketing and promotion companies such as The Artist Cooperative.

There are a lot of things we all know (or think we know) about the ins and outs of live performance, since most of us have been dealing with it professionally for years. But do we? Take the Quick Live Performance Quiz and see! We’ll start with some stuff most of us already know:

IT’S FAIRLY COMMON KNOWLEDGE THAT…

…developing a great live show and building a live show fan base are essential to entice the attention of a manager, agent, record company or investor these days. If you don’t have a great live act to back up your music, the odds are decidedly against you.

…the ability to sing and play your songs at the same time is a craft that can be taught and learned by rote. But to entertain? That is an art, and it can only be realized by taking the learned craft up one level into experimental rehearsal.

…the first two things a performer needs to do in order to win over an audience are the same two things you need to do when meeting people for the first time. Make eye contact and smile – and do so frequently during the entire time you’re on stage.

…when a performer is uncomfortable on stage, the audience is uncomfortable as well.

…most recorded songs should be moved up a key or twofor live performances in order to project more emotion.

BUT DID YOU KNOW THAT…

…90% of singer/songwriters make 90% of their income from live performances? The rest generally comes from publishing and merch, particularly if you look at music sales as merch. And you should.

…most members of an audience make up their minds whether they like you or not within the first ten seconds you enter the stage, even before you get to the microphone?

…your “snazzy” outfit, jewelry, hair style and even showing skin can work against the effectiveness of your performance?

…most live performers today are blocking out a third of their visual communication with their audiences by bad mic technique?

…a set list needsto be constructed according to feel, beat and tone, with a pattern to attract, entice, hold and excite an audience? And that a set of four songs may be a wholly different list of songs than a set of eight?

WHAT IF I TOLD YOU THAT…

…there are three ways to entertain an audience musically (melody, lyrics and rhythm) and you should aim for at least two of the three with every song?

…in addition to planning a set so that everything goes right, a performing artist should have a secondary plan for when everything goes wrong?

…the logos and wild colors on your wardrobe, instruments, amplifiers, and backdrop can provide unnecessary distractions to the audience?

…a note-for-note duplication of the recorded versions of your songs may not be best suited for live performance?

…a visual representation of your name on stage helps the audience remember you?

AND DID YOU REALIZE THAT…

…performing artists need to commit their songs and patter to memory so that they will stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about entertaining the audience?

…when all of the songs in a set are performed from the same place on a stage, they all seem to sound the same to an audience?

…what happens between the last note of one song and the first note of the next is as important as the songs themselves?

…practicing is not the same as rehearsing?

…how a performer exits the stage is almost as important as the entrance?

AND FINALLY…

…probably 90% of the audience knows nothing about how music is created, played or performed. Therefore, since the audience doesn’t know a verse from a chorus from a bridge, you as the performing artist have to visually let them know when you’re transitioning from one to another.

…an effective way to get the attention of an audience is to briefly get very soft or really loud.

…familiarity should dictate set length. If the audience is completely familiar with you and your songs, you should play for at least an hour; however if they don’t know you or your songs, you should play no more than a half hour TOPS.

…an audience member will be more likely to buy your musicafter the show if the song that really moved them during the set is available at the merch table.

…a performing artist should do things on stage that the audience could never do or would never think of doinganywhere, let alone in front of other people.

How’d you do?

15 – 20: Come on. You’ve done this before.

10 – 15: A little refresher course might be in order.

5 – 10: You need a good Live Performance Coach.

0 – 5: You need a great Live Performance Coach.

A Live Performance Coach is aware of all of these things and more. All the more reason for musicians and performing artists to work with one before embarking on a stage career. More next month.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE BACKSTAGE AFTERSHOW MEET & GREET

There comes a time in the life of everyone in the music business when one must suffer through the dreaded aftershow meet and greet with the artist. To Fred and Marge from Iowa, it probably sounds like a dream come true – meeting the artist they’ve always loved and admired where they can gush over about how wonderful the show was and how the artist is their favorite all-time performer and how much they enjoyed hearing the song that was played at their wedding, ad nauseum. But we know it’s not like that, is it?

Now that all of the fan/winner/VIP hoopla has been relegated to the before show meet and greet, the aftershow is strictly the domain of the industry (agent/label/promo person), being coerced by management and tradition to meet with the artist on the artist’s turf and try and have a painless conversation, not unlike the photo above of the late Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records with Crosby, Stills & Nash circa 1974. How uncomfortable do they look? Actually, Ahmet seems fine.

Regardless, here’s how it works: Initially, you gather near a backstage entrance, like cattle being led to slaughter, if only to listen to a diatribe from a security or road person about having your stick-on pass visible. Then, like sheep, you’re led down a dimly-lit hallway or two (should you drop breadcrumbs?) to a large room, which is conversely lit up well enough for open-heart surgery. There you will congregate with the bass player’s distant cousins from Peoria and end up in a conversation with them over warm beer and vegetable/cheese trays left over from the before show function. After some interminable amount of time, the artist’s personal assistant will gather you and the other unfortunate industry dweebs for yet another journey down a few more hallways until you are shown into the inner sanctum – the artist’s dressing room.

First, there will be some embarrassing re-introductions because no matter how many times management has told the artist who’s coming backstage, it’s all forgotten. Then you’ll try and help the artist put together who you are, when you last met them, and what you mean to his or her career, oftentimes inflating it more than it really is just to get some kind of positive reaction. Then you’ll talk about what efforts you’ve been making on the artist’s behalf recently and what the results are so far. You can only hope that the artist isn’t more well informed than youare on the subject, otherwise a cross examination could begin that will turn ugly.

But in the end, since there’s really nothing else to talk about, the artist is going to ask you what you thought of the show. Now you have to make a choice. If it were a good show, you’re safe. You can go ahead and say complimentary things and the artist will bask in your intelligent opinions. But what if it were a bad show? What would you say then? If you want to get out with your pride and your pants still intact, read on for some tips.Continue reading…

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the music industry has been subjected to (or participated in) an inordinate number of pointless panel discussions. A lot of my jaundiced view stems from the experience that the people who populate panels are doing so more for the prestige and notoriety of proselytizing to the converted than actually saying anything meaningful. Let’s get real: anyone who knows anything about how to get ahead in this business is not about to reveal it to a room full of competitors. Actually, while the panels are going on, the real business is being carried out in the adjacent hallways, or at lunch, or in the hotel lobby bar. Enough said about that.

But after all these years of spending time on both sides of the dais, I recently witnessed a panel situation that actually worked! In reality, I was more than a witness; I was one of the panelists, although that certainly wasn’t the reason it worked. Never in my experience have I been involved in anything so well planned, so well produced, so well done. It was put together by the organizers of the House of Blues Music Forward Foundation’s Bringing Down The House program. It was held earlier last month, not just here in LA at the Live Nation studios in Hollywood, but also Skyped to House of Blues clubs in seven other US cities where similar events were being held. Bringing Down The House is a national program sponsored by the HOB Foundation where local high school-aged artists and bands compete for the chance to perform on stage at their local House of Blues in a special evening performance. This year, they decided to take it one giant step further and incorporate a series of Saturday morning educational panel discussions covering virtually every aspect of pursuing music as a career.

My panel’s subject matter covered everything from songwriting to home studios to label A&R to performing rights organizations, for which real experts had been invited. Then there were the “kitchen sink” topics, which had apparently been left for me to address. The questions came fast and furious from a panel moderator, but the best stuff came from the high schoolers themselves, not only in the LA studio but also from kids in each of the participating cities in a kind of Face Time, real-time, large-screen situation. How refreshing to find a crowd of young, talented musicians and performers who seemed to be soaking up everything we had to say. A rare audience indeed. Read on!

“The industry is both the enemy and the best friend of the artist. Trouble is, they need each other.” – Chrissie Hynde

You may not be familiar with a rather obscure Rolling Stones’ song “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man”. It was the American B-side of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in mid-1965 and also appeared on the Out Of Our Heads LP. Before you read on, if you haven’t heard it, take three minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IImmRrFBz4 (Ignore the vain attempt by the YouTube poster at synching other footage to the song.)***

The target of the song was the promotion rep for London Records on the West Coast in the mid-60s – one George Sherlock. In addition to getting the band’s records played on the radio, Sherlock traveled with the band to set up tour promotions. Apparently Sherlock was from a different time and culture than the Stones (shocker), and so the band was put off by his demeanor. They subsequently wrote and recorded this song about the experience. From all reports, though, the Stones eventually warmed to Sherlock and didn’t mind having him around.

Although the song is an indictment of the quintessential radio promo guy of the era, there is a line of truth in the song: “I’m a necessary talent behind every rock and roll band.”Exactly. Records don’t just get played on the radio out of the blue. Someone has to bring it in the door and get it heard. Someone has to have, to quote Artie Fufkin from Polymer Records, a “relationship” with the programmer. (Ed. note: Spinal Tap is funny because it’s all true.) You can’t just walk in to a station and expect to get an audience with a radio programmer. Not going to happen. It takes a seasoned, experienced, professional radio promotion person to get a record played on the radio. There is no other way. None. Period.

Radio promotion is a sales job except that you’re not selling a tangible item – like shoes or cars or real estate – you’re selling an emotion, a feeling, a song and a sound– trying to convince a radio programmer that the song will make an audience feel so good that they’ll keep listening to the station just to see if whatever comes on next makes them feel that way again, over and over, day and night, 24/7/365.

But you have to remember that radio programmers are not really in the music business – they’re in the music using business; that is, they utilize music to sell airtime to advertisers who want to sell something to a certain segment of the population, not unlike how TV and film use music to enhance a certain scene. So even though radio promotion people are trying to sell the relative value of one record over another to a radio programmer, it’s really the radio audience that needs to be sold to, thereby making the job even harder – convincing a programmer that despite his or her taste, it’s all about what the audience wants to hear.

So who are these radio promotion people and why do they do whatever it is that they do? I’m not sure. On the surface, it would seem like a real cool gig. Working as an important cog in the music business wheel, taking people out to lunch and dinner on an expense account, going to shows, hanging with the bands, and, from the Stones’ description, driving Corvettes and wearing seersucker suits. But much like the tour manager job described in last month’s blog, there is also a downside. Continue reading…

“Believe half of what you see, son, and none of what you hear.” – “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong

In the course of the last 40 years or so, I’ve attended perhaps 5,000 musical performances of every genre and circumstance imaginable; from audiences of six to those of 60,000; from solo performers to large orchestras. In almost every one of them, I’ve been somewhat appalled by the reactions and impressions taken away by many of the audience members as to the relative value of the performances. Far too many times, I’ve found, the general public has little to no idea as to the quality of the songs or musicianship, but are way more impressed by their visual acumen. I’m not talking about staging or lights or smoke machines, but rather how the confidence exuded by the performers, their appearance and stage presence, trumped even the most obvious less-than-stellar renditions of the artists’ material.

My consternation led me to formulate my Sight/Sound Performance Ratio to which I’ve assigned a somewhat arbitrary 90%/10% (if only for the shock value of the statement), which means I believe that an audience rates a performance based on 90% of what they see vs. 10% of what they hear, whether they realize it or not. This is not meant as an assault on the intelligence of the concert-going public. It is a well-documented natural tendency of humans to evaluate (and believe) what they see long before surmising what they hear, as evidenced by the Norman Whitfield/Barrett Strong lyric above.

Until recently, I have not seriously avowed my audio/visual theory, as I’ve had no real backup for my statistic; it’s based on nothing but my own experience. But then I came upon two published studies which supported it, if only obliquely. The first is from Malcolm Gladwell’s widely read 2005 book Blink, and the second from a Harvard doctoral thesis on classical piano competitions, neither of which is nearly as boring as it sounds. Read on; you’ll be glad you did.Continue reading…

“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties.” – Bob Dylan

Ah, once again, a toast to the good old days of Baby Boomer music – back in the previous millennium when artists only had to churn out two great and ten good rock or pop songs and then their record company would handily foist those songs, 12 at a time, onto the waiting general public sponge through an all-too-willing radio station arrangement and a voluminous 9am-midnight record store.

That was the machinery that then allowed the artist to tour, virtually at will, to play all sorts of dumps and dives (and later the lawn seating general admission heat fests) at any time of the year that they so chose. Everyone had to put up with the long lines, the late sets, the uncomfortable (if available) seating, the bad food, watered down drinks, dark and scary distant parking – because we loved the music and we were all in it together. We needed to see and hear our favorite artists, live and in person, and we would go to any lengths to get there. It was a red badge of courage to detail to friends, family and co-workers the ordeal one had to go through to get tickets, fight the crowds, and stand for hours on end to catch the show. After all, the artist wouldn’t be back in town for at least another year or so, depending on how long it took to write and record the next album, which we were already craving. Continue reading…

It All Starts With The Music

Larry Butler is the GM of The Artist Cooperative, an independent music marketing company comprised of experienced former label executives and specializing in national and field staff radio promotion as well as the full spectrum of label services and music marketing.
IT ALL STARTS WITH THE MUSIC is an occasional attempt to make sense of it all - the bigger picture with insight from hindsight and experience. And what better time than now?
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